UC Berkeley Labor Center, Organizing to Improve the Quality Of

cover_FINAL 5/12/04 1:19 PM Page 1 Organize… to Improve the Quality of Jobs in the Black Community A Report on Jobs and Activism in the African American Community Steven C. Pitts UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education May, 2004 CENTER FOR LABOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION Institute of Industrial Relations University of California 2521 Channing Way Berkeley, CA 94720-5555 Office (510) 642-0323 Fax (510) 642-6432 http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu ORGANIZE . TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF JOBS IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY A Report on Jobs and Activism in the African American Community STEVEN C. PITTS Center for Labor Research and Education University of California-Berkeley May 19, 2004 Cover photo: National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, 1199 SEIU Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research and report was conducted with the support and funding of the University of California Institute for Labor and Employment and the University of California-Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education (the Labor Center). Throughout the entire project, I had the able assistance of several gradu- ate students including Christopher Niedt, Katrinell Davis, Erin Carstensen, Sandra Black, and Nana Boaitey. Several friends were invaluable sounding boards and information sources for this project including Weezy Waldstein, Bill Fletcher, Janice Fine, and Jennifer Gordon. Finally, I would like to thank the entire staff of the Labor Center for their unwavering belief in the importance of this venture. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 4 PART 1: INTRODUCTION 7 PART 2: CONDITIONS FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS IN THE LABOR MARKET: THE CRISIS OF BAD JOBS 10 PART 3: RESPONSE TO THESE CONDITIONS 14 PART 4: RACE MATTERS ... CLASS MATTERS 22 PART 5: MECHANISMS FOR RESPONDING TO THE CRISIS 27 APPENDICES Appendix A: Examples of Possible Follow-up Actions 33 Appendix B: Background Theoretical Notes 34 Appendix C: USA—Occupations with the Largest Number of Black Workers (2000) 38 Appendix D: Bay Area—Occupations with the Largest Number of Black Workers (2000) 39 Appendix E: Response Frequencies for Non-Work Issues 40 Appendix F: Responses for Work Issues 41 UC BERKELEY CENTER FOR LABOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION, MAY 2004 3 ORGANIZE ... TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF JOBS IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1. THERE IS A CRISIS OF BAD JOBS IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY The typical presentation of the problem around work in the Black community is that there is an unemployment crisis. An equally important crisis facing the Black community is the crisis of bad jobs: jobs that pay poorly; jobs with few benefits; jobs that offer no protection from employer harassment; jobs whose only future is a dead-end. During the expansion of the 1990s, the U.S. economy generated a large number of these bad jobs. At the same time, persons of color received a dis- proportionate number of the bad jobs. Hence, the expansion of the 1990s could be characterized as a “racially polarized job expansion.” By 2000, many of the occupations, where a significant number of African Americans maintained employment, paid wages that made it difficult to sustain a family. 2. THE RESPONSE TO THESE CONDITIONS Research indicates that a large number of organizations with African American constituencies focus on issues other than work. These groups deal with crucial concerns such as housing, environmental justice, the criminal justice system, drug counseling, and education. Most of the organizations that do have programs addressing issues of work do not attempt to improve the jobs held by Black workers. Instead, the emphasis is on the individualized provision of job readiness counseling, soft skills, and hard skills. There are some examples where organizations take up a transformative approach to bad jobs. While there are a variety of ways to transform jobs, the activities fall under two broad categories: building worker organizations to directly engage employers and enacting public policies to create labor standards in the labor market. 4 STEVEN C. PITTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 3. REFLECTIONS ON THE LACK OF TRANSFORMATIVE RESPONSES TO THE JOBS CRISIS Several reasons could explain the nature of these organizational responses. One tendency of the African American freedom movement focuses upon controlling assets within Black neighborhoods. This focus leads to issues of ownership, not to changing the relationship between employee and employer. This also concen- trates attention on jobs in a Black neighborhood and does not channel energies to changing the jobs that Black workers hold outside of the neighborhood. Second, the primary approach of the larger society to issues of work focuses upon the problems that individuals have as they engage the labor market and this approach tries to address these “deficiencies.” In contrast, an emphasis on the crisis of bad jobs leads to an examination of the structures of the labor market that generate bad jobs and the need to change these structures. Third, the success of the modern civil right movement led to the incorporation of African Americans into existing government agencies. Often, this incorporation resulted in the bureaucratization of activism and a shift from organizing for power to a passive client-based service provision. Fourth, an overlooked legacy of the anti- Communist hysteria of the 1940s and 1950s was the purge of individuals and organizations in the civil rights movement whose critique of segregation went beyond moral condemnation and contained an understanding of the social and economic structures that led to institutional racism. Without this broader per- spective, many arenas of civil rights activism narrowed. In the context of jobs, this narrowing meant a shift from labor market structures to individual workers. 4. MECHANISMS NEEDED TO RESPOND TO THE BAD JOBS CRISIS Fundamentally, addressing the crisis of bad jobs held by African Americans requires campaigns to directly engage employers that create bad jobs and campaigns to enact public policies that create labor standards for minimal job quality. These campaigns must be led by organizations that have the power to suc- cessfully challenge the status quo. Some mechanisms that can be strengthened to build this power include: Black caucuses within unions, labor-community alliances, new union organizing, and community-based worker organizing. UC BERKELEY CENTER FOR LABOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION, MAY 2004 5 ORGANIZE ... TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF JOBS IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY “Negroes are almost entirely a working people. There are pitifully few Negro millionaires, and few Negro employers. Our needs are identical with labor's needs—decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor's demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.” MARTIN LUTHER KING (AFL-CIO Convention, December 1961) 6 STEVEN C. PITTS PART ONE: INTRODUCTION Martin Luther King, Jr. described the common interests that are shared by two of the United States' greatest movements for social and economic justice: the African American freedom movement and the labor movement. However, when one examines these movements at the dawn of the 21st Century, both are in dire trou- ble. Today, the African American freedom movement is much weaker than it was at the end of the 1960s. The mass struggles of the modern civil rights movement (1955-1970) that destroyed the institutions of legal segregation were not success- ful in fully dismantling institutional racism. In a similar fashion, the labor movement has lost power since its heyday. The labor movement represented 32.5% of the workforce in 1953.1 Since then, the union density has decline to the point where in 2003, unions represent just 9.0% of private sector workers.2 This report represents the culmination of a project that was shaped by a desire to understand how these trends could be reversed. The dominant strategies employed by both movements in the past have less relevancy today, an era of corporate globalization that is qualitatively different than the era of corporate dominance that shaped the world for twenty-five years after World War II. The contemporary times have seen the growth of a job machine that creates some good jobs at the top of the wage spectrum, many bad jobs at the bottom of the wage spectrum, and few jobs in the middle. This hourglass economy has caused and been affected by the transformation of the workforce in the United States due to the immigration of peoples from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. This immigration has radically restructured relationships in labor markets and altered racial dynamics in communities. The African American freedom movement and the labor movement must view these changes as an opportunity to re-evaluate old strategies and develop new energies to meet the challenges placed before them by corporate globalization. New immigrant communities have been leading 1Leo Troy (1983), Union Sourcebook Membership, Structure, Finance Directory, Table 3.63. 2U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Earnings, January 2004, Table 42, www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat42.pdf. In the public sector, unions represent 41.5% of employees. UC BERKELEY CENTER FOR LABOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION, MAY 2004 7 ORGANIZE ... TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF JOBS IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY new waves of activism. Immigrant workers have been engaged in many of the leading unionization campaigns in recent years. Immigrant workers have been in the forefront of the creation of worker centers—a community-based form of worker organization.3 In fact, it was the energy provided by immigrant worker centers that generated the immediate impulse for this project.

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